Sean Cronan is a PhD student in the History Department studying the diplomatic and political history of East Asia and Southeast Asia between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. His research examines the impact of the Mongol conquests on how political actors from China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Burma, and beyond understood the interstate order of the day. His project will highlight the emergence of new diplomatic norms in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as how these norms came to be challenged and re-negotiated in the wake of the collapse of the Mongol Empire in East Asia. By drawing on archival materials in Classical Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Burmese, he seeks to trace a pre-modern history of Asian diplomacy, identifying the Mongol conquests as a transitional moment in the emergence of a new age of political thought in Asia.
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